Product Review: Wilton Ready-to-Decorate Icing

The Wilton Ready-to-Decorate Icing (6.4 oz) looked like the perfect solution to my problem of how to decorate my son's 2nd birthday cake. I ended up making a dark chocolate cake to mark the festivities and wanted to write some lettering and make some small decorations on the cake. I purchased this item at my local Wal-Mart for $3.99 a few days before the birthday bash!

I baked the cake the morning of the party and let it cool as instructed. The cake turned out perfect. I placed the cake on the presentation pan, and added the base coat of chocolate icing on the cake. After the icing was smoothed out on top and down the sides of the cake, we decided it was time to start with the decorating and lettering of the cake.

After reading the directions on the back of the can, me and my best friend jumped into the task of decorating the cake. The back of the can states that Wilton ready-to-decorate icing is fun and easy to use. We were to simply twist on a decorating time and create spectacular cupcakes, cookies, cakes, and treats. The product came with 4 plastic decorating tips. We chose the smaller writing tip as we thought it would be the best at controlling the letters. I held the can upside down at a 45 degree angle as specified. Instead of the icing coming out in a smooth fashion where I could write the letters, it icing came out in fast squirts and made it hard to write. Most letters ended up being fat and wide as the icing came out too much. We had to every letter stop and shake the can to rebuild the pressure in the can for the icing to come out. After writing the whole word "Happy" on the cake with the same issues, we decided it was a lost cause and decided to go the old zip lock bag way. We sprayed as much of the icing into the bag that we could, and shook the can some more and sprayed even more icing. It seemed that we got all the icing out of the can, so we cut the tip in the zip lock bag, and stated writing. That word definitely came out better.

While I was writing "Birthday" on the cake, my friend was playing with the can of icing again. There was still more icing left in the can. She shook the can again and there came out squirts of icing again. We decided to try and do flowers and a pattern on the side of the cake with the left over icing in the can. The flowers turned out alright, but not too impressive. While doing the pattern on the side of the cake, the can started "squirting" again leaving big gaping spaces around the cake. I ended up going back around the cake again and tried to fill in the holes, but it did not look good either way.

I was not impressed with this item at all. I don't know if for some reason I got a dud on this one, but there was definitely something wrong. I was looking forward to another great product from a brand that I have trusted and used for over a decade now, but was very disappointed in the end. After this one experience with this product, I do not beleive that I will ever consider purchasing this item again.